“Mr. Archfield!  Oh, come back!  I have seen it before,” entreated Anne; and he strode back, with a gesture of offering her support, and trembling, she clung to his arm.  “It does not hurt,” she said.  “It comes and goes—­”

“You have seen it before!”

“Twice.”

No more could be said, for through the gloom the white plume and gold-laced uniform of the marquis were seen.  He had missed them, and come back to look for them, beginning to apologise.

“I am confounded at having left Mademoiselle behind.—­Comment!”—­as the sound betrayed that Charles was sheathing his sword.  “I trust that Monsieur has met with no unpleasant adventure from my people.”

“Oh, no, Monsieur,” was the answer, as he added—­

“One can never be sure as to these fiery spirits towards an Englishman in the present state of feeling, and I blame myself extremely for having permitted myself to lose sight of Monsieur and Mademoiselle.”

“Indeed, sir, we have met with no cause of complaint,” said Charles, adding as if casually, “What is that church?”

“‘Tis the Jesuits’ Church,” replied the governor.  “There is the best preaching in the town, they say, and Jansenists as we are, I was struck with the Lenten course.”

Anne went at once to her room on returning to the house.  Naomi, who was there already, exclaimed at her paleness, and insisted on administering a glass of wine from what the English called the rere supper, the French an encas, the substantial materials for which had been left in the chamber.  Then Anne felt how well it had been for her that her fellows at the palace had been so uncongenial, for she could hardly help disclosing to Naomi the sight she had seen, and the half-finished words she had heard.  It was chiefly the feeling that she could not bear Naomi to know of the blood on Charles’s hand which withheld her in her tumult of feeling, and made her only entreat, “Do not ask me, I cannot tell you.”  And Naomi, who was some years older, and had had her own sad experience, guessed perhaps at one cause for her agitation, and spared her inquiries, though as Anne, tired out by the long day, and forced by their close quarters to keep herself still, dropped asleep, strange mutterings fell from her lips about “The vault—­the blood—­come back.  There he is.  The secret has risen to forbid.  O, poor Peregrine!”

Between the July heat, the narrow bed, and the two chamber fellows, Anne had little time to collect her thoughts, except for the general impression that if Charles finished what he had begun to say, the living and the dead alike must force her to refuse, though something within foreboded that this would cost her more than she yet durst perceive, and her heart was ready to spring forth and enclose him as it were in an embrace of infinite tenderness, above all when she thought of his purpose of going to those fearful Hungarian wars.